31,500 Replays - A look at balance in Starcraft II

For the past nearly 5 months, we've held 2 Playhem Daily tournaments every day on EU and NA. Our brackets fill to an average of 150-220 players each time and match verification is done by the players uploading replays and those replays have just been sitting on servers collecting dust - until now. Thanks in part to the wonderful work done by TL user Dakota_Fanning in creating Sc2Gears I've taken an in-depth look at how our map pool has been influencing tournament outcomes and balance in general.

Over 31,500 replays (so that's what it looks like) of mostly masters, grand masters, and professional gamers. I consider these to be a great representation of real-world statistics as the entry is free and no qualifications to sign up so a very wide range of players enter, unlike data from TLPD or the like which reflect mostly the very top tier. I present you my findings:

ConclusionAs tournament organizers, map makers, and a community as a whole we can have a huge impact on the balance of this game that goes almost as far as Blizzard's balance patches. As the game continues to develop and move forward I think it's important that some of these older maps are discontinued and replaced with better options (Dual Sight, Shattered, Metalopolis) or modified to compensate for the differences in win rates that are seen.

Tal'Darim Altar LE gets a special shout out for being possibly the most balanced map currently in our pool, it scored nearly 50% win rates for every match up and overall race win rates.

As a result of these numbers we've significantly changed our map pool the last few weeks and are going to continue to change it to include new maps and see how they stack up to the rest.

Finally, a word cloud including all chat from the replays. 33,076 GGs.

These are by no means perfect statistics, they are very rough data that I just wanted to share. There are surely many techniques and filters that could be applied to get much more accurate information out of this but I'll leave that to map makers and Blizzard. I think even with just the basic level of sorting I applied to the data, it can provide useful insight into map balance and overall race interactions.

Very very interesting information here. It's interesting to see that maps that people feel are favoured to once race v another (ZvX on Metal, TvZ on Antiga) are in fact rather balanced.Tal darim as the most balanced map is also quite interesting.

The results of Dualsight aren't really surprising I think. Despite the general consensus that it's a good map I personally think it's a horrible map for Protoss due to the way the expansions are designed.

Overall a great write-up! I think Tal'Darim Altar LE needs a few more replays to produce a significant result.